bingedrinker's comments

(kernel 3.8.0-25-generic, hardware MacBookAir5,1)

If you mean "better" as in quantitatively more, then yes.

The quality of those drivers are far, far worse than the OSX drivers.

Also, how is it surprising that OSX has few drivers, when OSX is meant for very specific Apple-designed hardware?

Anyway. I'm running Ubuntu on a new Macbook Air (5,1), and both the touchpad and the Wifi drivers are an absolute atrocity on Linux.

A few things just doesn't work, like the keyboard backlight.

The LCD backlight is also broken, half the time you have to unplug and replug the power to get the backlight to light up after automatic dimming, for some reason.

As for wifi, I quote, live, from my syslog: Jun 16 22:27:45 laptop kernel: [28768.034285] brcmsmac bcma0:0: brcms_c_ampdu_dotxstatus_complete: Pkt tx suppressed, illegal channel possibly 48 Jun 16 22:27:45 laptop kernel: [28768.035618] brcmsmac bcma0:0: brcms_c_ampdu_dotxstatus_complete: Pkt tx suppressed, illegal channel possibly 48 Jun 16 22:27:45 laptop kernel: [28768.036427] brcmsmac bcma0:0: brcms_c_ampdu_dotxstatus_complete: Pkt tx suppressed, illegal channel possibly 48 ... etc ...

Constant disconnects, poor speed. Switch to the proprietary driver and bandwidth is 2-3x better and the disconnects disappear, though.

The trackpad issues seem unfixable, even though there are lots of options to fiddle with. The quality is just poor or the driver is not designed to work with the type of touchpad that the Mac has. Tapping causes the cursor to move to a new position before doing a click, left-clicking causes the cursor to zoom to the bottom left of the screen, etc. etc. etc. If the precision of the Mac touchpad driver is index 100, I would give the Linux driver a score of 5.